Tag Archives: Wall St. Journal

I can’t stop kicking myself for continuing to be astounded by this regime.

This man is either entirely tone deaf to the American people or he has balls of titanium.

He is poised to sign an order that will require all businesses who want to contract with the federal government to disclose their political donations and those of their officers – for the last 2 years and going forward. This is an effort to prevent the GOP from making any money for the next election. He’s already bragging that he will raise $1billion which is nothing more than another form of intimidation. But he plans to make sure that the Republicans are not able to raise any money. I suppose he thinks that he can’t beat a good Republican candidate unless he does whatever he can to dry up their donations and scare them into thinking that no one can beat his $1billion campaign.

And as the Wall Street Journal says, by the same token, Obama wants bipartisan support for other things this coming year.

If he follows through with this disclosure plan, I doubt that he will get it. Even that milquetoast RHINO Susan Collins is furious with his plans: The administration’s argument that this is about disclosure is “a fraud,” she declares. The very notion “offends me deeply.”

When union leaders negotiate with a politician, they’re negotiating with someone they can hire and fire. Public unions have numbers and money, and politicians need both. And politicians fear strikes because the public hates them. When governors negotiate with unions, it’s not collective bargaining, it’s more like collusion. Someone said last week the taxpayers aren’t at the table. The taxpayers aren’t even in the room.

As for unions looking out for the little guy, that’s not how it’s looking right now. Right now the little guy is the public school pupil whose daily rounds take him from a neglectful family to an indifferent teacher who can’t be removed. The little guy is the beleaguered administrator whose attempts at improvement are thwarted by unions. The little guy is the private-sector worker who doesn’t have a good health-care plan, who barely has a pension, who lacks job security, and who is paying everyone else’s bills. Peggy Noonan/WSJ

And then there’s this:

Last year, for example, the Open Society Foundation, backed by liberal financier George Soros, gave NPR $1.8 million to help support the latter’s plan to hire an additional 100 reporters. When NPR receives million-dollar gifts from Mr. Soros, it is an insult to taxpayers when other organizations, such as MoveOn.org demand that Congress “save NPR and PBS” by guaranteeing “permanent funding and independence from partisan meddling,” as the liberal interest group did last month. It was even more insulting when PBS posted a message on Twitter thanking MoveOn.org—the group that once labeled Gen. David Petraeus as “General Betray Us”—for the help. Senator Jim DeMint/WSJ

I read two interesting columns today in the WSJ that on the surface have nothing in common until you start to think about it.

Peggy Noonan wrote that “all candidates must assume now that they are being taped, wherever they are, including private conversations. Sharron Angle was taped in a private meeting with a potential supporter, who leaked it to the press, to her embarrassment. The taper/leaker was a sleaze and a weasel—a sleazel—but candidates can no longer ever assume they are speaking in confidence; they have to assume even aides and supporters are wired. (Go reread “Game Change” and wonder if some of the conversations reported there were taped.) The zone of privacy just got smaller, and the possibility of blackmail, a perennial unseen force in politics, wider. Prediction: This fact will, at some point in 2012, cause an uproar.”

And the next step from recording is filming and posting on YouTube.

“Annoy the wrong person, behave in a way some blogger disdains, and you will soon find yourself locked in the digital pillory, exposed to snark and ridicule. These are supposed to be salubrious incentives to civil public behavior, but I haven’t seen much evidence that a Web-armed society is a polite one,” according to Eric Felton.

He goes on to say that “The most odious aspect of these online humiliations is that they don’t go away. As law professor Daniel J. Solove notes in his book “The Future of Reputation,” the Internet saddles us with permanent digital baggage: “Internet shaming creates an indelible blemish on a person’s identity. Being shamed in cyberspace is akin to being marked for life.”

It made me think that in this day and age, how do we find politicians with absolutely spotless pasts? And on the internet, thanks in great part to the anonymous character of it, you don’t need proof to make accusations.

Let’s look at some partially exaggerated scenarios. Are we going to have candidates whose college frat pranks, whether true or not and then maybe posted on a social network site, can come back years later and haunt them during a campaign? Do we expect an 18 or 20 year old to know, that their “dabbling in witchcraft on a date” and maybe some classmate filmed it on a cell phone, will sink their political aspirations in 20 years when it’s posted to YouTube? How many 18 or 24 year olds know they will be running for political office in 20 years? How many of us knew at 22 that we would be where we are now? And how many of us did what qualifies as basically stupid things in high school and college?

It makes me wonder how many otherwise qualified and exceptional people will shy away from running for office because of these kinds of pitfalls. Or how many otherwise fine lives will be ruined. This is a new age that we are just growing into. Most of us have not had the world wide web at our fingertips for too much more than a decade. And many of us have no idea on whose hard drives our past is residing: whether it’s a completely true past or partially manipulated one by someone who would wish us ill.

Shortly before Barack Obama signed the health-care bill, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee created a stir with a report suggesting our new law will lead the Internal Revenue Service to hire as many as 16,500 new agents. The Republicans came up with the figure by extrapolating from the IRS budget, the amount spent on employees, and the $10 billion in new funding that the Congressional Budget Office says the IRS will need to meet its new responsibilities under this legislation.

It’s made for some heated debate. In an entertaining segment on the Fox News Channel last week, host Bill O’Reilly tried to get Rep. Anthony Weiner (D., N.Y.) to admit that the IRS would have to enforce the penalty tax for people who refused both to get the mandated coverage and to pay the penalty. Mr. Weiner accused Mr. O’Reilly of “making stuff up.” The next day, IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman seemed to settle the question in Mr. Weiner’s favor when he testified to Congress that IRS agents are not going to be auditing taxpayers to verify that they’ve obtained acceptable health insurance.

Or did he?

The individual mandate remains one of the murkiest bits of this legislation. During the 2008 primaries, Mr. Obama criticized rival Hillary Clinton for favoring such a mandate. He later changed his mind, for one big reason: There’s no way to afford expensive provisions such as forcing insurance companies to cover people with, say, pre-existing conditions unless millions of healthy people who won’t need insurance are forced to pay into the system. With the mandate, the government gets more healthy people into the risk pool—and with the penalty it gets their money whether they buy coverage or not.

In testimony before a House Ways and Means subcommittee last Thursday, the IRS commissioner deflected questions about the agency’s precise role vis-à-vis health care. Mr. Shulman reassured citizens that this bill does not “fundamentally alter” their relationship with the IRS, and said the IRS would not be snooping into their health records. About the penalties associated with the mandate, he was less clear.

Partly that’s because the law is unclear. The original House bill opened the door for criminal sanctions against Americans who didn’t buy health insurance and pay the penalty. The Senate bill did the same until Sen. John Ensign (R., Nev.) successfully pushed to amend the bill. Even so, the final language begs the question that Mr. Shulman and Mr. Weiner avoided: Who’s going to enforce the mandate, and how?

It’s more than a theoretical proposition. Approximately one in six drivers goes without auto insurance, according to the Insurance Research Council, even though most states require it. As for health coverage, the U.S. Census says that Massachusetts’ has the nation’s lowest rate of uninsured at 5.4%, thanks in part to its own individual mandate. Even so, costs have exploded and fines for not carrying coverage are increasing.

Almost by definition, those hit by the mandate will be either young people starting out, or those working for smaller businesses that do not provide employees with health coverage. Back in November, a report by the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that nearly half (46%) of the mandate penalties will be paid by Americans under 300% of the poverty line.

In today’s dollars, that works out to $32,500 for an individual. For a family of four, it’s $66,150. Generally speaking, these are not the folks who have to worry about paying taxes on, say, a villa in the Dominican Republic or income from the International Monetary Fund.

So we are left with one of two possibilities. The first is that the penalty for not having “minimal essential coverage” is fully enforced, in which case Americans of relatively modest means will get a lesson in how the government deals with people who don’t pay up.

Or the penalty for violating the individual mandate will become like the fines for not filling out your Census form. In other words, unenforced. In that case, the costs of this legislation will be even higher and more hidden than we have been led to believe.

In his appearance before Congress, Mr. Shulman stated he was still working on “the proper resources” the IRS would need to handle the tax provisions of the health-care act. Maybe that won’t mean 16,500 new agents. If the Republicans do manage to take back Congress come November, however, it should mean hearings in which Mr. Shulman provides the American people with specific answers about how much bigger the IRS is going to get because of this bill—and how exactly the IRS will deal with Americans who don’t pay the penalty tax.

Then again, that’s something Congress might have done before passing the bill.

This is an incredible read. It’s disgusting and disheartening to find out the real deals and arm twisting, bullying and threats that went on last week to pull this horrible bill across the finish line. And if nothing illustrates the Alinsky rule – the ends justify the means, at any cost – this behavior by OUR elected officials does. We elected these liars, cowards and crooks. These people have no business in the hallowed halls of our Founders. There should be investigations and impeachments over these atrocious activities.

For me, this is all beyond belief. How can these people look in their mirrors every day? How could they have ever put their dirty hands on a Bible and committed to uphold the Constitution? There is no longer any question in my mind that every single one of these people have to go in November. There is no redemption for them as the descendants of our Founding Fathers. They have sullied their offices and the memory of the great men who provided them with the greatest nation on the face of the earth.

I am enraged.

Inside the Pelosi Sausage Factory

Last week Republican Rep. Mike Pence posted on his Facebook site that famous Schoolhouse Rock video titled “How a Bill Becomes a Law.” It’s clearly time for a remake.

Never before has the average American been treated to such a live-action view of the sordid politics necessary to push a deeply flawed bill to completion. It was dirty deals, open threats, broken promises and disregard for democracy that pulled ObamaCare to this point, and yesterday the same machinations pushed it across the finish line.

You could see it all coming a week ago, when New York Rep. Louise Slaughter let leak a breathtaking strategy whereby the House would not actually vote on the unpopular Senate bill. The House would instead vote on a “reconciliation” fix to that bill, and in the process “deem” the underlying legislation—with its Cornhusker kickbacks and Louisiana purchases—passed.

The Slaughter Solution was both blunt admission and warning. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not have 216 votes to pass the Senate bill, there never was going to be majority “support” for it, but they’d pass it anyway. The final days were a simple death watch, to see how the votes would be bought, bribed or bullied, and how many congressional rules gamed, to get the win.

President Obama flew to Pennsylvania (home to five wavering House Democrats), Missouri (three wavering), Ohio (eight), and Virginia (four) to hold rallies with small, supportive crowds. In four days, Mr. Obama held 64 meetings or calls with congressmen. The goal was to let undecideds know that the president had them in his crosshairs, that he still had pull with the base, and he’d use it against them. By Saturday the tactic had yielded yes votes from at least half the previously undecided members of those states.

As for those who needed more persuasion: California Rep. Jim Costa bragged publicly that during his meeting in the Oval Office, he’d demanded the administration increase water to his Central Valley district. On Tuesday, Interior pushed up its announcement, giving the Central Valley farmers 25% of water supplies, rather than the expected 5% allocation. Mr. Costa, who denies there was a quid pro quo, on Saturday said he’d flip to a yes.

Florida Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (whose district is home to the Kennedy Space Center) admitted that in her own Thursday meeting with the president, she’d brought up the need for more NASA funding. On Friday she flipped to a yes. So watch the NASA budget.

Democrats inserted a new provision providing $100 million in extra Medicaid money for Tennessee. Retiring Tennessee Rep. Bart Gordon flipped to a yes vote on Thursday.

Outside heavies were enlisted to warn potential no votes that unions and other Democrats would run them out of Congress. Al Lawson, a Tallahassee liberal challenging Blue Dog Florida Rep. Allen Boyd in a primary, made Mr. Boyd’s previous no vote the centerpiece of his criticism. The SEIU threatened to yank financial support for New York’s Michael McMahon. The liberal Working Families Party said it would deny him a ballot line. Obama deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand vowed to challenge South Dakota Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin if she voted no. New York’s Scott Murphy was targeted as a part of a $1.3 million union-financed ad campaign to pressure him to flip. Moveon.Org spent another $36,000 on ads in his district and promised a primary. Messrs. Boyd and Murphy caved on Friday.

All the while Mrs. Pelosi was desperately working to provide cover with a Congressional Budget Office score that would claim the bill “saved” money. To do it, Democrats threw in a further $66 billion in Medicare cuts and another $50 billion in taxes. Huzzah! In the day following the CBO score, about a half-dozen Democrats who had spent the past months complaining the bill already had too many taxes and Medicare cuts now said they were voting to reduce the deficit.

Even with all this, by Friday Mrs. Pelosi was dealing with a new problem: The rule changes and deals winning her votes were losing her votes, too. The public backlash against “deem and pass” gave several wary Democrats—such as Massachusetts’s Stephen Lynch and California’s Dennis Cardoza—a new excuse to vote no.

Mrs. Pelosi jettisoned deem and pass. Once-solid Democrat yes votes wanted their own concessions. Oregon’s Pete DeFazio threatened to lead a revolt unless changes were made to Medicare payments to benefit his state. On Saturday Mrs. Pelosi cut a deal to give 17 states additional Medicare money.

By the weekend, all the pressure and threats and bribes had left the speaker three to five votes short. Her remaining roadblock was those pro-life members who’d boxed themselves in on abortion, saying they would vote against the Senate bill unless it barred public funding of abortion. Mrs. Pelosi’s first instinct was to go around this bloc, getting the votes elsewhere. She couldn’t.

Into Saturday night, Michigan’s Bart Stupak and Mrs. Pelosi wrangled over options. The stalemate? Any change that gave Mr. Stupak what he wanted in law would lose votes from pro-choice members. The solution? Remove it from Congress altogether, having the president instead sign a meaningless executive order affirming that no public money should go to pay for abortions.

The order won’t change the Senate legal language—as pro-choice Democrats publicly crowed within minutes of the Stupak deal. Executive orders can be changed or eliminated on a whim. Pro-life groups condemned the order as the vote-getting ruse it was. Nevertheless, Mr. Stupak and several of his colleagues voted yes, paving the way to Mrs. Pelosi’s final vote tally of 219.

Even in these waning minutes, Senate Democrats were playing their own games. Republicans announced they had found language in the House reconciliation bill that could doom this entire “fix” in the Senate. Since many House Democrats only agreed to vote for the Senate bill on promises that the sidecar reconciliation would pass, this was potentially a last-minute killer.

Senate Democrats handled it by deliberately refusing to meet with Republicans and the Senate parliamentarian to get a ruling, lest it be unfavorable and lose House votes. The dodge was a clear dereliction of duty, but Democrats figure the Senate parliamentarian won’t dare derail this process after ObamaCare passes. They are probably right.

So there you have it, folks: “How a Bill Becomes a Law,” at least in Obama-Pelosi land. Perhaps the most remarkable Democratic accomplishment this week was to make the process of passing ObamaCare as politically toxic as the bill itself.

President Obama was elected by millions of Americans attracted to his promise to change Washington politics. These were voters furious with earmarks, insider deals and a lack of transparency. They were the many Americans who, even before this week, held Congress in historic low esteem. They’ll remember this spectacle come November.

My hope is that global warming has died. I mean died dead – really really dead. And the ‘scientists’ seem to have done it to themselves. How brilliant and how appropriate. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed seeing anything like I’ve enjoyed watching this whole debacle unfold. I guess partly it’s because we came so close to disaster, that I’ve been giddy over this.

Now, don’t you feel really secure in this conference when Chavez and Mugabe are pushing for us to sign this crap in Copenhagen? Doesn’t that make anyone else – aside from those of us with functioning brains – suspicious?

And this gem (also from the TimesOnline) from the most brilliant Gordon Brown (I wish he were our president, don’t you?):“But I also think our children, growing up, going to school every day, I don’t want them to live in a world of floods, of droughts, of extreme weather. It is really important, therefore, for Britain that we get this deal and it is important that I do everything I can in the next few days to make that possible.”

Only “two rogue scientists,” as the oh-so-reassuring Climategate Deniers would have us believe? Walter Williams, esteemed economics professor at George Mason University, last week summarized Climategate, to date:

“New evidence proves that climatologists and environmental policy advocates have not only fed us lies (and) engaged in scientific and academic fraud, but committed criminal acts as well. Last month, Russian computer hackers obtained thousands of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. CRU has the world’s largest temperature data set. In collaboration with scientists around the world … its research and mathematical models form the basis of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 global warming report.”

The Climategate e-mails show man-made global warming fraudsters “around the world” brazenly discussing “both the destruction and hiding of data that does not support their global-warming claims,” Williams notes. “They discuss criminally deleting data rather than comply with Freedom of Information Act requests. There’s also discussion of faking data for journals such as Nature, conspiring to keep opposing science out of peer-reviewed journals (of which they controlled the editorial boards), and using statistical ‘tricks’ to hide the cooling period of the last 10 years. …”

But it fell to Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger to note, on Dec. 4 in a column headlined “Climategate: Science Is Dying,” just how massive the aftershocks could be:

“I don’t think most scientists appreciate what has hit them,” Mr. Henninger wrote. “This isn’t only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. … The public was told repeatedly that something called ‘the scientific community’ had affirmed the science. … Because ‘science’ said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. …

“What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event,” Henninger was one of the first to grasp. “This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. …

“The East Anglians’ mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming’s claims — plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish — evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. … Most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom.”

Starting to get it? To land continued government grants, it was necessary to “develop” evidence that would “prove” the claim that man-made global warming will fry us all on a griddle unless we cede massive new power, massive wealth, our standard of living and our industrial dominance of the world to the “scientific” central state.

What those who dutifully excreted such steaming piles of crap have accomplished is to require that the world now presume, in self-defense, that any state-funded “science” is little more than government-funded propaganda to justify taxing us, regulating us and advancing national socialism under a new, green flag.

Mind you, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving gang of grant-chasing welfare leeches.

It’s not as though this is their first blatant fraud in the service of state repression. If secondhand smoke causes cancer, why is it when the first U.S. studies failed to turn up the sufficiently strong, 2-to-1 correlation between disease and cohabiting with a smoker, which had always been the required standard for showing medical causality, the parties simply reduced the amount of correlation required — and subsequently ignored larger, international studies that show no provable harm from secondhand smoke, at all?

“The tobacco industry challenged the EPA in court,” reports Steven Milloy, a biostatistician, lawyer and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and publisher of Junkscience.com. “A federal judge vacated the EPA’s main conclusions, stating that ‘EPA disregarded information and made findings on selective information; … deviated from its [standard procedures]; failed to disclose important findings and reasoning; and left significant questions without answers. EPA’s conduct left substantial holes in the administrative records.’ ”

Yet children in the government youth propaganda camps are taught to this day that “Even secondhand smoke causes cancer; ‘science’ says it’s so.”

The pace of the world bailout from the “Let’s cripple our economies to stop global warming” baloney is breathtaking. Two weeks ago, public outcry defeated “cap-and-trade” legislation — which had been considered a done deal — in Australia. After 14 members of his party leadership resigned in protest, conservative opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, who had signed onto the scheme, was dumped, marking the first time since 1916 that a leader of a major Australian political party was deposed on grounds of a single policy decision.

Without conservative support, the legislation was promptly defeated in the Aussie senate.

“Cap-and-trade in Australia — which just a week ago was declared a certainty — is officially dead,” reports blogger Tim Andrews. “Early last week … Turnbull announced that he had reached agreement with the government to implement cap-and-trade, thus binding his party to support it in parliament en bloc. … The days that followed were simply stunning. … Political offices went into meltdown, unable to cope with the torrent of phone calls, faxes and e-mails opposing what was effectively a massive tax hike.”

Dumped by his own party, Turnbull’s “political career is over, his aspirations to become prime minister have come to naught,” Mr. Andrews reports.

That noise you hear is the folding of tents in the night. It froze last night, in Las Vegas. Maybe they can try “the coming glacial winter,” again.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal, and author of “Send in theWaco Killers” and the novel “The Black Arrow.”

This is the kind of crap you get when you have Henry “porky pig face” Waxman in charge of stuff.

We are facing serious problems – deficit spending that is beyond astronomical, a war that is slipping away from us in Afghanistan, a health care debate and debacle – and these guys are looking for ways to put MORE small businesses out of business and more people out of work!

You know, I have to ask myself how did we (baby boomers) make it to adulthood without a consumer protection do-gooder council of goofballs to protect us? Our cribs were painted with lead based paints and how many of us, as toddlers, cut our teeth on the sides of our cribs and play pens? We played in pedal cars that were painted with this lethal paint. Our blocks and tinker toys… oooooooooooh, *shaking my head* this could go on forever.

It’s been bad enough that they have recalled formula and toothpaste made in China, toys in incredible numbers but now they are requiring special labeling and tagging on new items so that they can be tracked, if and when necessary. And these are toys made in America, by American businesses who employ Americans!

These do-gooders are harming the consumer they brag on being advocates for, as well. IF these businesses can afford to comply with these new, ridiculous regulations, they will pass the added cost on to the consumer. The employees, who are likely union and therefore the protected class by this administration and this congress, will end up losing out, too. We know the domino effect of a business who is not making money or losing money: no new hires, more lay-offs, no raises or bonuses, no business expansion.

It just gets more amazing all the time how stupid these people are that we have elected… or to be more precise, that California has elected. Waxman, Boxer, Pelosi, all Californians and all as dumb as duck shit.